A dozen years ago, if you had a second phone line dedicated to your dial-up modem so you could
go online without disrupting your home telephone service, you were a serious technology expert.

Or maybe you just wanted to play
Diablo II.

There was little special about the basic play structure of
Diablo II: chopping herds of fantasy monsters into bits and collecting the booty.

But it became the fastest-selling computer game at the time because it was one of the first
mass-market games built around the concept of an online community.

You could communicate with other players. You could even trade them your phat loot (to use the
vernacular) for an item you might need.

It took Blizzard Entertainment, the game’s creator, 12 years to deliver the sequel, but fans’
interest never waned. In its first week after going on sale on May 15,
Diablo III sold 6.3 million copies, following its predecessor as the fastest-selling
computer game. It was the No. 1 selling game on Amazon.com last week. With
Diablo III, Blizzard has once again delivered the definitive action role-playing
experience.

The
Diablo formula is simple: Kill the beasties, take their treasure, sell it, upgrade your
magical equipment, rinse and repeat. The humans of this medieval land are under assault from the
forces of hell, and your character has to save the world. You can play as a barbarian, an
archerlike demon hunter, a wizard, a monk or a witch doctor. Each class can be customized by
choosing different abilities.

But the main element in
Diablo isn’t really your persona; it is your equipment.
Diablo is based on randomization. Every time you kill a digital demon, a rare magic item
might appear. But let’s say you’re an effete, spell-slinging wizard and you find a powerful
battle-ax. In that case, you can sell it to another player in the role of a burly barbarian.

In
Diablo II, that meant spending hours trolling real-time chat rooms looking for a buyer.
Diablo III ties together millions of players through an auction house where they can sell
items for in-game virtual gold.

But Blizzard’s far-reaching innovation for
Diablo III is an auction house where players can buy and sell virtual game items using
actual greenbacks. The real-money auction house is scheduled to arrive today after several delays —
which, though disappointing, seems prudent, given that the virtual-gold auction house hasn’t run
smoothly. (The real-money system is meant to link with credit-card and PayPal accounts, with
Blizzard taking a cut from each auction, adopting the lucrative model embraced by games such as
FarmVille.)

At its core,
Diablo III plays essentially as a modernized version of
Diablo II.

Given
Diablo II’s fervent fan base and strong franchise identity, it probably would have been
unfair to expect Blizzard to deviate much from the basic formula.

So, for now, many of us will go on happily clicking little monsters on the screen and sweeping
up our imaginary magical swords, helmets and gauntlets.